Ruby Sparks

I know I've been really behind on my movie reviews recently. I'm not really sure why with most of them. I love movies which means I watch quite a few of them and I guess maybe I don't want people to think I just gush all the time and I feel like sometimes I should be more critical? I don't know. If you want me to be really critical, I'll review "The Campaign."

Today I have to gush some more. I watched "Ruby Sparks," at home last night with the sick boyfriend while we ate grilled cheese and tomato soup. (Homemade grilled cheese has healing powers, at least the way I make it.) When we renting this movie, I prefaced it by saying, "This is probably going to be really silly and dumb but I have to see it anyway. This is every writer's dream."

This movie met all of my expectations and exceeded them. From her first appearance, I fell absolutely in love with Ruby. She was smart, quirky, adventurous and did a wonderful job of getting the young writer out of his comfort zone a bit. But gradually, I began to hate the writer. He took her for granted. He just assumed that because he had created her, she would always be there waiting for him. But he had managed to create a whole human and as a result, she had her own opinions about things and she wasn't content to wait around his house all day while he wrote... or tried to write... or didn't write and just brooded.

At the point when the writer realizes once again that he can play God and make Ruby do whatever he wanted, my heart broke. (I'm tearing up right now at work just thinking about it.) She was so perfect in her imperfection. I loved that she looked at the world in a different way and thought that if you named your dog after your favorite author, you were subconsciously killing your idols. See her as a puppet was devastating. I don't know know why she crawled under my skin so much. It could be that I know that if the same situation happened to pretty much any writer in the world, we'd all manage to screw it up. It is so severely dangerous to get exactly what you want.